Tuesday, 28 February 2017

inXile Studios have released their long, long-gestating CRPG, Torment: Tides of Numenera.

A "spiritual" successor to the greatest CRPG ever made, Planescape: Torment (1999), Tides of Numenera is set in Monte Cook's Dying Earth/Book of the New Sun-inspired pen-and-paper RPG setting, Earth a billion years in the future where technology and magic have become indistinguishable. Colin McComb, one of the creative geniuses behind the Planescape D&D setting and a writer on Planescape: Torment, is one of the lead designers on the new game. Chris Avellone, the creative lead of Planescape: Torment, also contributed quests and prose to the new game, as has bestselling fantasy author Patrick Rothfuss.

So far Torment: Tides of Numenera has wracked up someexcellentreviews. It is available now on PC, X-Box One and PlayStation 4.

Monday, 27 February 2017

Warner Brothers Games and Monolith Studios have confirmed that a sequel to their well-received and successful Middle-earth: Shadows of Mordor is in development will be released this summer.

Shadows of Mordor was a third-person action game with a combat system heavily influenced by the Batman Arkham titles. It improved on this with the introduction of the "Nemesis System", where villains who manage to defeat you in combat gain new skills and abilities, forcing you to gain intelligence on their powers and try to turn their minions against them. The result was less of a traditional beam 'em up and more a game of Orc Career Ladder Simulator. This was an intelligent and interesting game mechanic, but ultimately could not disguise the game's thin amount of content (particularly the startlingly tiny world maps) or prevent extreme repetition setting in after the first couple of hours. Also, pulling off all the orcish Red Weddings in the world doesn't help when the game's comically grimdark tone is massively at odds with the source material. The game's ludicrously violent tone is so at variance with the spirit of Tolkien that it's quite startling the developers even chose to use the Middle-earth setting and not something - anything - more appropriate.

The sequel, Middle-earth: Shadow of War, features a larger game world and a more sophisticated Nemesis System, with more of the game world affected by your actions, including entire strongholds that can be updated by the enemy if you fail to pull off a raid on them. It also features a storyline that reads like bad Tolkien fanfiction, complete with the hero forging his own Ring of Power (what?) and going up against Sauron directly (excuse me?).

Not all cities are the same. Some are peaceful, civilised places where weary travellers can rest from their journeys and tend to the business of the day. Others are beautiful retreats sitting on the shores of azure seas. Some are crime-riddled, smog-shrouded hellholes ripe for revolution. Others float an infinite distance above a spire of infinite height at the very centre of the multiverse. Some are criss-crossed by railways, home to cactus people and sport an embassy from hell.

One of the most iconic and oldest cities in fantasy: Lankhmar, from Fritz Leiber's Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser series of short stories and novels. Artwork by Jonathan Taylor.

Fantasy is a broad genre which tells many different types of story. But central to many of those stories is the city. A bold adventuring fellowship may spent a lot of time in enchanted woods, braving treacherous mountains or battling dragons in abandoned dwarven mines, but sooner or later their path leads back to the streets and sewers of a bustling metropolis. This is usually just in time to be chased by hooded assassins, get into misunderstandings with the city watch or, in extreme cases, withstand siege by a barbarian horde which burns the place to the ground. Life in a fantasy city is never dull, although frequently short.

In this series of articles I will be exploring the cities of fantasy. Some of these you may know well, and this will be an opportunity to reacquaint yourself with the seven tiers of Minas Tirith, the hills of King’s Landing or the gaslit streets of New Crobuzon. Others may be less familiar, and this will be a chance to find new strange new places to explore. Have you heard of Ba Sing Se, the Earth City that spreads for dozens of miles and is surrounded by towering walls thousands of feet high? Or Menzoberranzan, the city of the dark elves that lies like a deadly spider in the Underdark of Faerun? In this journey we may also visit Junon, a quaint fishing village turned into a massive energy weapon by the villainous Shinra Corporation, or the Imperial City of Tamriel with its circular walls and central tower. It is possible we will also visit the great floating metropolis of Armada, ploughing the seas of Bas-Lag, or the mountainous city-castle of Gormenghast.

One of the newest cities in fantasy: Sagus Cliffs from the video game Torment: Tides of Numenera, released on 28 February 2017. Artwork by Chang Yuan.

There are also those cities whose streets may not be mapped so easily or reliable guides found. Nessus of the south, from where Severian set out on his quest. Unmappable Viriconium with its constantly shifting streets and locales. Amber, the one true world and city of which all others are faint echoes. And many more besides.

Finally, we will visit the greatest and grandest fantasy city of them all, Ankh-Morpork, City of (Swiftly Dashed) Dreams and City of Rapidly Monetised Wonders, as well as the famed City of What the Hell is That Smell. All life can be found in Ankh-Morpork, no matter if you want to find it or not.

But all journeys must start somewhere, and it makes sense for our first stop to be the place from which all others can be reached: Sigil, the City of Doors that sits at the very centre of the multiverse.

Thank you for reading The Wertzone. To help me provide better content, please consider contributing to my Patreon page and other funding methods, which will also get you exclusive content weeks before it goes live on my blogs. The Cities of Fantasy series is debuting on my Patreon feed and you can read it there one month before being published on the Wertzone.

Sunday, 26 February 2017

Filming is well underway on Netflix's adaptation of Richard Morgan's cyberpunk novel Altered Carbon, the first in his Takeshi Kovacs trilogy.

According to James Purefoy, the cast and crew are currently shooting the third episode of ten (shooting began in November in Vancouver). Purefoy describes the show as huge in scope, one of the biggest projects Netflix has attempted. Actor Joel Kinnaman confirms that the show has a bigger budget than the first three seasons of Game of Thrones (when the budget for that series grew from $6 million to $7 million an episode; Season 7 has a budget of over $14 million per episode, which Altered Carbon is unlikely to match any time soon).

Bill Paxton, a Hollywood actor known for his role in numerous SFF movies and frequent collaborations with director James Cameron, has died at the age of 61 from complications following heart surgery.

Paxton started acting in the 1970s in bit parts and supporting roles in TV and film. In 1984 he was cast in James Cameron's The Terminator as one of the punks the Terminator meets at the start of the film. Cameron was impressed by Paxton's personality and gave him a larger role in Aliens (1984) as Private Hudson. Hudson was given a slightly deranged personality and a series of lines which have become endlessly quoted by SF fans (including "Game over man!" and "Express elevator to hell, going down!"). Other roles at this time included Weird Science, Commando and Near Dark. He regrouped with James Cameron on both True Lies (1994) and Titanic (1997), playing the explorer searching the wreck of the vessel in the sequences set in the modern day. He later accompanied Cameron on several explorations of the real wreck and in 2003 narrated his documentary film on the subject, Ghosts of the Abyss.

I've been reeling from this for the past half hour, trying to wrap my mind and heart around it. Bill leaves such a void. He and I were close friends for 36 years, since we met on the set of a Roger Corman ultra-low budget movie. He came in to work on set, and I slapped a paint brush in his hand and pointed to a wall, saying "Paint that!" We quickly recognized the creative spark in each other and became fast friends. What followed was 36 years of making films together, helping develop each others projects, going on scuba diving trips together, watching each others kids growing up, even diving the Titanic wreck together in Russian subs. It was a friendship of laughter, adventure, love of cinema, and mutual respect. Bill wrote beautiful heartfelt and thoughtful letters, an anachronism in this age of digital shorthand. He took good care of his relationships with people, always caring and present for others. He was a good man, a great actor, and a creative dynamo. I hope that amid the gaudy din of Oscar night, people will take a moment to remember this wonderful man, not just for all the hours of joy he brought to us with his vivid screen presence, but for the great human that he was.
The world is a lesser place for his passing, and I will profoundly miss him.

Paxton's other film credits include Twister, Apollo 13, Mighty Joe Young, Spy Kids 2 and 3, Thunderbirds (as Jeff Tracy) and Edge of Tomorrow, as well as two critically-acclaimed collaborations with Billy Bob Thornton, in One False Move and A Simple Plan. Famously, his role and demise in Predator 2 makes him the only actor to have been killed by an Alien, a Predator and a Terminator (Lance Henriksen is sometimes cited, but Bishop survived the attack by the Alien Queen in Aliens, albeit in an extremely damaged state).

Like many 1980s film actors, Paxton found a new lease of life in his career by switching to television in the 2000s. From 2006 to 2011 he starred in the lead role on HBO's Big Love, followed by a lead role on the History Channel mini-series Hatfields and McCoys, opposite Kevin Costner. For this role Paxton won an Emmy. In 2014 he starred as the recurring villain John Garrett on Agents of SHIELD. Paxton was cast last year in the TV series Training Day in the lead role: the show only began airing a few weeks ago, and its future is now in doubt.

Bill Paxton was a talented performer, offering excellent (and often scene-stealing) support in films like Aliens whilst also making a very solid lead in films such as One False Move. He will be missed.

Saturday, 25 February 2017

For a decade, FBI agents Fox Mulder and Dana Scully investigated the paranormal. They encountered many strange people and situations, but they found absolute, verifiable proof of the existence of paranormal activity hard to find. Many years later, they are tempted out of their new lives to investigate claims by an internet talk-show test and conspiracy theorist.

The X-Files ran for nine seasons between 1993 and 2002. At its height it was a pop culture phenomenon, drawing in enormous viewing figures and turning its two leads, David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson, into global stars. The presence of both well-crafted, well-written stand-alone stories and a long-running, intricate story arc attracted a passionate fanbase. Unfortunately, as the show went on producer and showrunner Chris Carter became more interested in spinning out the storyline than actually providing any hard answers. The audience grew bored and drifted away, as did the stars. Duchovney quit the show in its penultimate season, returning only for a bitty and unsatisfying finale. Two spin-off movies failed to resolve anything either.

Fourteen years later, Fox have resurrected the show for a six-episode mini-series, hopefully to lead into a recurring series. Laudably, they chose not to remake the show with a new cast, instead tempting back Carter, Duchovney and Anderson for new stories. Less laudably, the show builds on the tedious and unsatisfying storyline elements from the last two or three seasons of the original series, by which time a lot of the audience had checked out. The result is a bitty and unsatisfying mini-series which does manage to occasionally evoke the magic of the show at its best, but not consistently enough.

The first episode casts Joel McHale (Community) as Tad O'Malley, a right-wing conspiracy theorist with a talk show and a large audience. Despite being a tinfoil nutjob, O'Malley has stumbled across hard evidence of a wide-ranging government conspiracy that began with the Roswell crash in 1947. This is like catnip to Mulder, who is soon embroiled in his usual shenanigans, which involve constructing elaborate theories out of thin evidence (to Scully's eye-rolling disgust), running around dark buildings with flashlights and exasperated exchanges with his boss, FBI Deputy Director Walter Skinner (Mitch Pileggi, who does not appear to have aged a day in the intervening years). It's all very silly, deeply tedious and, in the more credulous modern days, falls horribly flat.

The second episode is better, featuring weird deaths caused by high-pitched sounds. It's nothing special, but is fine as a watchable, "standard" episode of The X-Files.

The third episode, Mulder and Scully Meet the Were-People, is outstanding. Written by the original show's finest writer, Darin Morgan, this episode deconstructs The X-Files brilliantly, is beautifully written, laugh-out-loud hilarious and really brings Duchovny and Anderson to life after some fairly restrained performances in the previous two episodes. Mulder and Scully Meet the Were-People may be one of the best episodes of The X-Files ever made, and by itself justifies the existence of this reboot.

The fourth episode is another solid, okay, mystery-of-the-week episode. It does gently revisit one of the more significant but forgotten story points of the original series, namely that Mulder and Scully had a child together who they gave up for adoption, but doesn't advance the storyline very far.

The penultimate episode of the season, Babylon, is weird. The tone is light and self-mocking, with elements include a young, next-generation version of Mulder and Scully (making the originals feel self-conscious) and scenes involving Mulder tripping balls with a vision sequence which is quite amusing in isolation. But the episode as a whole is about a suicide bombing carried out by Muslims in an American town, an event which in real life would raise tensions and be a serious, game-changing moment in the national consciousness. To see it featured as the catalyst for a comedy episode is serious tonally jarring, leaving the episode feeling off as a result.

The final episode of the season is supposed to be a big, epic moment representing the culmination of the "syndicate" storyline that slowly percolated over the course of the entire original series and the first movie, with the United States struck down by a devastating virus. But although Fox has clearly given this reboot a lot of money, it's not enough to sell the idea that the entire nation is on the brink of disaster. As a result there is no tension and the writing is dreadful. Just when things threaten to turn interesting, with the return of original recurring character Monica Reyes, the episode ends on an eye-rolling cliffhanger which may not be resolved for another year or two.

The return of The X-Files is, on one level, welcome. Duchovny and Anderson both still have a warm chemistry and charisma, although it takes a couple of episodes to resurface. The stand-alone episodes confirm that The X-Files is at its best when giving its two leads a puzzle to solve and watching how they unpick it from their two differing perspectives, and this remains fun. But times have moved on from the mid-1990s. Mulder's open-minded enthusiasm now comes across too often as tinfoil ranting (not helped by often being proven wrong) and Carter's insistence on picking up on storylines no-one cared about in 2002 means an awful lot of time is wasted on the exact same uninteresting waffle that lost the show its original viewership and saw it cancelled. If anything, the overwhelming success of Mulder and Scully Meet the Were-People highlights how silly and tedious these elements are. Whilst reducing The X-Files to a comedy show would be a shame, its over-earnest tone, which was getting a bit much by four or five seasons in, feels very overwrought today.

The tenth season of The X-Files(***, but ****½ for the third episode) works as a proof-of-concept, showing there is life in the old show and some ways it could come back on a more permanent basis and be watchable and interesting. However, it also highlights how other shows - most notably Lost and Fringe - have picked up the gauntlet thrown down in the interim and done similar things, only more consistently and with a higher level of quality (and not outstaying their welcome to anything approaching the same extent). Season 10 of The X-Files is available now in the UK (DVD, Blu-Ray) and US (DVD, Blu-Ray).

Patrick Stewart has announced that, at the age of 76, he has retired from playing the character of Professor Charles Xavier in 20th Century Fox's X-Men series of films.

Stewart debuted in the role of Professor X in the movie X-Men (2000). He reprised the role in X2 (2003), The Last Stand (2006) and Days of Future Past (2014), as well as brief appearances in X-Men Origins: Wolverine (2009) and The Wolverine (2013). His final role as Professor X comes in Logan (2017), which also marks the final appearance of Hugh Jackman as Wolverine (although Jackman hasn't completely ruled out a comedic cameo in a future Deadpool movie, given his online banter with Ryan Reynolds).

Stewart's decision to leave the role is unsurprising. Given the events of X-Men: Apocalypse (2016) and the ongoing rewriting of the X-Men film continuity over the last few films, as well as Jackman's decision to retire, it's clear that Fox will taking future X-Men films in a different direction, perhaps leaning more on the new cast with James McAvoy playing the role of a somewhat younger Professor X, or even contemplating a full, from-scratch reboot after twenty years of the current, increasingly convoluted continuity.

Stewart was given the role by director Bryan Singer in 1999 following a fan campaign to have him cast in the role. It gave Stewart his second popular Hollywood role following his performance as Captain Jean-Luc Picard in Star Trek: The Next Generation from 1987 to 1994 and four spin-off films: Generations (1994), First Contact (1996), Insurrection (1998) and Nemesis (2002). During the making of the X-Men films Stewart met Ian McKellan and the two distinguished actors formed a strong "bromance" that has continued ever since (with McKellan officiating at Stewart's wedding).

Although Stewart has departed the role of Professor X, he will continue working as an actor on screen, on stage and in voiceover work. His next role will be as, er, Poop in the animated Emoji Movie.

Thursday, 23 February 2017

Way back in 1977 Stephen Donaldson helped shape the modern fantasy genre with Lord Foul's Bane, the first book in The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, the Unbeliever. He has completed three series in the same setting, totalling ten books, as well as an additional fantasy duology (Mordant's Need) and an excellent five-volume space opera, The Gap.

Donaldson is now working on a new fantasy trilogy, The Great God's War. The first novel in the series, Seventh Decimate, now has a cover blurb:

The acclaimed author of the Thomas Covenant Chronicles launches a powerful new trilogy about a prince’s desperate quest for a sorcerous library to save his people.Fire. Wind. Pestilence. Earthquake. Drought. Lightning. These are the six Decimates, wielded by sorcerers for both good and evil. But a seventh Decimate exists—the most devastating one of all...For centuries, the realms of Belleger and Amika have been at war, with sorcerers from both sides brandishing the Decimates to rain blood and pain upon their enemy. But somehow, in some way, the Amikans have discovered and invoked a seventh Decimate, one that strips all lesser sorcery of its power. And now the Bellegerins stand defenseless.Prince Bifalt, eldest son of the Bellegerin King, would like to see the world wiped free of sorcerers. But it is he who is charged with finding the repository of all of their knowledge, to find the book of the seventh Decimate—and reverse the fate of his land.All hope rests with Bifalt. But the legendary library, which may or may not exist, lies beyond an unforgiving desert and treacherous mountains—and beyond the borders of his own experience. Wracked by hunger and fatigue, sacrificing loyal men along the way, Bifalt will discover that there is a game being played by those far more powerful than he could ever imagine. And that he is nothing but a pawn...

Tuesday, 21 February 2017

SF and fantasy author Chris Wooding has just finished (about six hours ago) his latest novel.

Wooding has written science fiction, YA dystopias and fantasy dieselpunk (in his excellent Tales of the Ketty Jay series), but his only overt work of secondary world fantasy to date was the excellentBraided Path trilogy, which was inspired much more by Asian history and trope. His latest work is different: a much more "traditional" epic fantasy series where he can play around with the tropes of the established genre.

The new book is my first attempt at doing, er, I suppose you'd call it 'traditional' fantasy. I grew up on Shannara, LOTR, Dragonlance and that kind of thing; they were the books that got me into fantasy. And I realised in almost 20 years of writing I'd never actually tried a fantasy story in that kind of world: the kind of pseudo-European environment that most readers identify as fantasy. My big series were always set in weird environments: in Broken Sky everyone had a 'superpower' through their spirit-stones; The Braided Path was Oriental flintlock fantasy shading into science fiction; Ketty Jay was dieselpunk fantasy. This new one, I'm not throwing out all the tropes at the start as I usually do. I want this one to feel like a fantasy, like the books I loved when I was a kid. And then I'm going to tell a story working within that format, and try to make it all fresh and new, using all the ensemble casting and characterisation skillz I honed during the Ketty Jay books. It's not going to be like the fantasy of the 80s and 90s, with its black and white morality and clear-cut heroes and villains; nor is it going to be grimdark. It's a pretty lo-magic setting. Beyond that, all I can tell you is that I'm having a total blast writing it. There's a certain freedom in being able to employ the assumptions and traditions of fantasy fiction and concentrate on story and character, instead of starting everything from scratch.

The book will likely be published in 2017 or 2018 (2018 may be a touch more likely at this point, but we'll see). Given the quality of Chris's previous work, I'll be checking it out ASAP.

Filming began yesterday of the second stand-alone Star Wars prequel movie. This film, as yet unnamed, focuses on the young life and times of Han Solo and takes place roughly halfway between Revenge of the Sith and Rogue One/A New Hope.

The movie is directed by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller (21 Jump Street, The Lego Movie) and written by father-and-son team Lawrence and Jon Kasdan. Lawrence Kasdan has been working on Star Wars for almost forty years, having worked as a writer on The Empire Strikes Back, Return of the Jedi and The Force Awakens. This film will apparently be his swansong on the franchise.

Jones reports that the last few years have been very difficult but she is now getting her writing career back on track, with finishing her current novel in progress (presumably Endlords) a priority. She is also planning to release blog entries and articles via Patreon.

This is excellent news. It's good to see Ms. Jones back writing and hopefully we'll be seeing the end of the story she started over twenty years ago soon.

Thank you for reading The Wertzone. To help me provide better content, please consider contributing to my Patreon page and other funding methods, which will also get you exclusive content weeks before it goes live on my blogs.

Friday, 17 February 2017

Dan Harmon's fantasy roleplaying/improvisational comedy show HarmonQuestis returning for a second season.

The first season of the show was one of the unexpected highlights of last year. It was very funny and revelled in showing the fun that people can have playing a pen-and-paper RPG. The season ended in an epic battle (where the regular crew were joined by Nathan Fillion) against the forces of evil and were triumphant, but at the cost of one of their number being sucked into a portal into an other dimension. It was a bit of a cliffhanger, which I assume will be addressed in the new season.

Guest stars this season will include Harmon's Community buddy Gillian Jacobs, Elizabeth Olsen (late of the Marvel Cinematic Universe as Scarlet Witch) and comedian and actor Patton Oswalt.

Thursday, 16 February 2017

Neil Gaiman has confirmed that he is working on a sequel or successor to his 1997 novel Neverwhere (itself an adaptation of the 1996 BBC mini-series). In an interview with the UK's Channel 4 News, he says he was sparked off by the idea of including refugees in the world he created. Gaiman spent some time last year in a refugee camp in Jordan.

Gaiman did not provide much more information than the following:

“I’m working on a new novel. For the first time in twenty
years I’m going to go back to my novel Neverwhere.
For me it’s taking not only the dispossessed, not only the homeless, not only
those who fall through the cracks, but also the refugees. Also, people who are
fleeing war, fleeing intolerable situations, barely getting out with their
lives and then what happens to them next."

Neverwhere started off as a BBC TV series, developed with comedian Lenny Henry, before transitioning to a novel the following year. In 2013 it was adapted for the radio, starring James McAvoy, Natalie Dormer, Benedict Cumberbatch, Sophie Okenedo, Sir Christopher Le and Anthony Head, In 2014 Gaiman wrote a long-promised spin-off novella, How the Marquis Got His Coat Back, for George R.R. Martin and Gardener Dozois's anthology Rogues. This in turn was adapted for radio last year.

The new novel will be called The Seven Sisters. No date has been set for publication.

Neverwhere was hugely influential on the development of modern urban fantasy. China Mieville cites the novel as a major inspiration for his novels King Rat and Un Lun Dun.

Gaiman was speaking ahead of the launch of his new TV series, American Gods, which will air in the USA on Starz in April.

Gaiman is also writing the script for a TV adaptation of his collaborative novel with Sir Terry Pratchett, Good Omens. After almost twenty-five years in development hell, this has finally been greenlit for production by the BBC and Amazon.

Thank you for reading The Wertzone. To help me provide better content, please consider contributing to my Patreon page and other funding methods, which will also get you exclusive content weeks before it goes live on my blogs.

With the recent news that Brandon Sanderson's Oathbringer is going to be very big indeed, I thought it'd be interesting to look at the longest SFF novels and series.

These lists are not exhaustive and consistency of reporting these figures can be quite variable. I have opted for word counts as the most accurate way of estimating length, as page counts can vary immensely based on page margins and font sizes.

Longest Novels

1. Varney the Vampire by James Malcolm Rymer and Thomas Peckett Prest667,000 words • 1845-47
This long novel was serialised in "penny dreadfuls" of the mid-19th Century and chronicles the adventures of Sir Francis Varney, a vampire. This book's genre credentials have been disputed (with the suggestion that Varney is actually a madman rather than a real vampire), but there seems to be a general acceptance that the book is a genuine work of the fantastic, and the longest SFF work ever published in one volume (which it was in 1847). The book was also influential on Bram Stoker's later Dracula (1897) and introduced many of the tropes of vampire fiction, including the "sympathetic vampire" protagonist.

2. Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand645,000 words • 1957Highly debatable as a genre work rather than a political novel, although the story is partially set against a dystopian background and genre historian John Clute identifies the novel as SF (plus it inspired the very SF Bioshock video game series and fantasy Sword of Truth series), so okay, we'll count it.

3. Jerusalem by Alan Moore615,000 words • 2016Alan Moore's prose magnum opus is a massive, dizzying and baffling journey into the surreal. It's so huge that it is available in a two-volume edition in a nice slipcase.4. Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace545,000 words • 1996Infinite Jest has primarily literary allusions, although the book's setting - a North American superstate consisting of a unified Canada, USA and Mexico - is a futuristic dystopia. The book could have even been bigger, with 250 manuscript pages trimmed for length by the publishers.

5. To Green Angel Tower by Tad Williams520,000 words • 1993The concluding volume of Memory, Sorrow and Thorn is bigger than the first two novels in the series (The Dragonbone Chair and Stone of Farewell) combined. A titanic, shelf-destroying novel, it is only available in mass-market paperback in two volumes, subtitled Siege and Storm.6. The Fiery Cross by Diana Gabaldon502,000 words • 2001The fifth volume of Diana Gabaldon's Outlander historical romance series, spiced up by a time-spanning culture clash, is absolutely gigantic.7. A Breath of Snow and Ashes by Diana Gabaldon501,000 words • 2005The sixth volume of Diana Gabaldon's Outlander historical romance series doesn't quite match its predecessor.8. Ash: A Secret History by Mary Gentle500,000 words • 2000Mary Gentle's novel is a dazzling mix of SF, historical drama, fantasy, alternate history and generaly bizarrity. The novel was published in one volume in the UK, but the American publishers released it as four in the USA.9. Oathbringer by Brandon Sanderson (estimated)495,000 words (estimated) • 2017The final word count could go up or down, but Brandon Sanderson has estimated that the third volume of The Stormlight Archive will be 25% longer than the already-huge second volume.10. The Stand by Stephen King472,376 words • 1978Stephen King's biggest novel in a single volume, notable for also foreshadowing The Dark Tower series. The above word count is for the expanded and revised edition.

11. The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien470,000 words • 1954-55This book needs no introduction. The most influential fantasy novel ever written, often incorrectly cited as the biggest genre novel of all time. Due to paper shortages after the Second World War, the book was released in three volumes, inadvertently creating the classic fantasy trilogy at the same time.12. The Naked God by Peter F. Hamilton469,000 words • 1999The biggest space opera ever written, even more remarkable because it was the concluding volume of an even bigger trilogy, The Night's Dawn.13. It by Stephen King445,134 words • 1986Arguably Stephen King's most famous single novel.14. Sea of Silver Light by Tad Williams443,000 words • 2001This is the concluding volume of Tad Williams's fantasy/cyberpunk mash-up Otherland. Williams likes to end big.15. A Storm of Swords by George R.R. Martin422,000 words • 2000George R.R. Martin started his Song of Ice and Fire series being somewhat concerned about the word count and went to great lengths to keep the first two books down to a friendly 300,000 words or so apiece, dropping chapters back into the next volume if necessary. However, with Martin planning a five year time-jump after this book, he had no choice but to write the story to its natural conclusion. The result was a book that pushed the UK publishers to the limits of what they could publish in one volume. The paperback version, in fact, was released in two volumes.16. A Dance with Dragons by George R.R. Martin420,000 words • 2011The difficult-to-write fifth volume in A Song of Ice and Fire ended up being somewhat longer than A Storm of Swords, but Martin cut it down to slightly shorter in the final sweat and edit.17. Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson415,000 words • 1999Neal Stephenson's first gigantic book, but not his last (although this remains his longest book) is an interesting romp through WWII history, cryptography and weirdness. A stand-alone, but it also acts as a thematic prequel (and actual sequel) to his later Baroque Cycle.

18. An Echo in the Bone by Diana Gabaldon402,000 words • 2009

The seventh Outlander novel is huge, but feels quite modest compared to the longest books in the series mentioned above.19. Drums of Autumn by Diana Gabaldon401,000 words • 1996The fourth Outlander novel. Given the several books in the series that are just under 400,000 words, I can only assume that the author gets through a lot of keyboards.20. The Wise Man's Fear by Patrick Rothfuss400,000 words • 2011Patrick Rothfuss's sequel to The Name of the Wind is considerably larger. It remains to be seen if the final volume of The Kingkiller Chronicle, The Doors of Stone, will be bigger still.21. Words of Radiance by Brandon Sanderson400,000 words • 2014The second volume of The Stormlight Archive is about to lose its record-setting status as Sanderson's biggest novel and the biggest novel in the series to Oathbringer. But it's still pretty big.

Below 400,000 words, the number of fantasy and SF novels in that size bracket shoots up massively. So rather than try to come up with an exhaustive list, here's some notable SFF novels with their word counts:

Lord of Chaos is the sixth and longest Wheel of Time novel, clocking in at 395,000 words.

Toll the Hounds is the eighth and longest Malazan Book of the Fallen novel, reaching 389,000 words.

Maia, by the late Richard Adams, is 379,130 words.

Magician, by Raymond E. Feist, is a relatively breezy 313,410 words (about 330,000 words in the 1992 extended edition). Which makes the decision to publish the novel in two volumes in the United States (as Apprentice and Master) all the weirder.

Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norell is 309,000 words.

Temple of the Winds, the longest Sword of Truth novel, is a modest 307,520 words in length.

The Order of the Phoenix, the longest Harry Potter novel, is 257,045 words in length. That's over three times the length of the shortest novel in the series, The Philosopher's Stone.

The Sword of Shannara, the novel that gave birth of the modern fantasy genre, is a relatively modest 228,160 words. It's also still Terry Brooks's biggest novel, by far; none of the other Shannara novels top 200,000 words and only three top 150,000 words.

SF is generally a lot shorter than fantasy, but the fact that Frank Herbert's seminal Dune is only 188,000 words - shorter than three of the Harry Potter books! - might be surprising.

The Longest SFF Series

This is a much more debatable list, since some series are more diffuse than others. The Riftwar books, for example, form nine distinct series, but also have narrative elements spanning all twenty-nine books in the series. The same is true of the Shannara series. The Discworld books I haven't even attempted to fit on here for this reason. This list is therefore a bit more speculative.

The Wheel of Time by Robert Jordan & Brandon Sanderson (15 volumes): 4,360,000 words.

The First Law by Joe Abercrombie (3 volumes): 618,000 words (1,216,000 including the stand-alone sequels).

Why Page Counts Vary

It's remarkable what difference shifting a margin over by a few millimetres can make. One-volume editions of The Lord of the Rings, for example, can vary from 750 pages (for tiny-font editions on onion paper) to the better part of 2,000 (for large-print versions for readers with bad eyesight). Back in 2001 Pan Macmillan were able to squeeze thepaperback of The Naked God (469,000 words) into almost the exact same page count as its predecessor novel, The Reality Dysfunction (385,000 words) despite being significantly longer, just by manipulating font sizes and margins.

This is why page count is a poor guide to working out a novel's true length, and word count is more reliable indicator.

Word counts can also differ, depending on the programme used (most modern word counts come from the ebook editions) and how they count punctuation. Some counters will also include cast lists, footnotes and appendices, others will disregard them. The publishers may even give differing word counts because they did a count before the last edits were finalised, or they forgot that the new edition has more stuff in it.Sources
SFF blogger Abalieno has been keeping tabs on book lengths over on Looping World for many years and some of these figures come directly from there. Excellent work from him there.

Reading Length is a great site which extracts book lengths from multiple sources and then works out how long it will take to read the book. It tends to the conservative, so some of the above figures may actually be less than what is actually the case. However, it does make mistakes: its word count for Dune, for example, is for the 50th anniversary edition which includes several hundred pages of bonus material which isn't part of the novel.

Novel Word Count doesn't seem to be as exhaustive as it was planned to be, but its Stephen King page is pretty good.

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Philip Pullman published his critically-acclaimed His Dark Materials fantasy trilogy (Northern Lights, The Subtle Knife and The Amber Spyglass) for young readers between 1995 and 2000. Regarded as darker and more challenging than the contemporary Harry Potter series, the trilogy has sold over 22 million copies and spawned an unsuccessful movie adaptation, The Golden Compass, in 2007. Since completing the trilogy he has published two further stand-alone novels, The Scarecrow and His Servant (2004) and The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ (2010).

Over a decade ago Pullman started working on a Dark Materials companion volume, called The Book of Dust. He made it clear this was not going to be a fully-fledged sequel, but a companion book expanding on some of the worldbuilding elements in the original trilogy (most notably, the nature of the substance "dust"). Pullman has occasionally mentioned it in interviews as something he was tinkering with, not giving any impression it was a major project.

That, it turns out, was a bit of an understatement. The book has ballooned into a fully-sized sequel trilogy, The Book of Dust, which will take place in two different time periods. It will incorporate elements from Lyra Belacqua's childhood as a prequel to the main trilogy, but it will also explore the life and times of a grown-up Lyra some thirty years later. Pullman confirms that other Dark Materials characters will also appear, making this simultaneously a prequel and sequel to the original trilogy.

David Fickling Books will released Book 1 - still to have its title confirmed - in October. It's unclear if Pullman has completed the entire trilogy (you'd hope so, given the length of time it's taken), but the publishers have said it won't take seventeen years for the next volume to arrive.

Excellent news. Although His Dark Materials lost its way towards the end (when people in gyrocopters started shooting down angels with miniguns), the trilogy was weird, offbeat and challenging. Here's hoping the pre-sequel is in a similar vein. And has more armoured polar bears!

Meanwhile, the BBC and New Line Studios have teamed up to produce a new TV series based on His Dark Materials. The series is expected to unfold over four eight-episode seasons. Casting is currently underway with production due to start in Wales in the next few months for a likely 2018 debut.

Tuesday, 14 February 2017

Brandon Sanderson has confirmed that his new book, Oathbringer, the third volume in The Stormlight Archive, is very, very big.

In a Reddit update, Sanderson says that the novel is 25% longer than Words of Radiance, which came in at 400,000 words. That suggests that Oathbringer will be 500,000 words in length.

This would almost certainly make Oathbringer the second-longest fantasy novel of all time. The #1 spot is held by To Green Angel Tower (520,000 words), the third volume of Memory, Sorrow and Thorn by Tad Williams. The #2 spot is disputed, but probably goes to Ash: A Secret History, which clocks in between 493,000 and 500,000 (depending on if you count the notes or not). Two of Diana Gabaldon's Outlander novels also exceed 500,000 words, but the genre these novels occupy is highly questionable (since they are historical romances with a time travel element).

The Lord of the Rings, often cited as a very long epic fantasy novel, is a relatively breezy 470,000 words in length.

Oathbringer will be released, presumably in a very small font, in November this year.

Monday, 13 February 2017

Ragnar Lothbrok is now the King of Kattegat, ruling over a host of lesser earls. He has also forged a strong alliance with King Ecbert of Wessex, enjoying more power and influence than any Viking king before him. Aware that his people still yearn for conquest and raids, Ragnar turns to his loyal Christian friend and advisor Athelstan, who tells him tales of a fabled city to the south called Paris. Ragnar becomes obsessed with tales of this city and soon has marshalled the might of the Viking nation against it. But his obsession comes at a very high cost.

The third season of Vikings does not hang around. Having chronicled the (allegedly) reluctant rise to power of Ragnar Lothbrok over two previous seasons and nineteen episodes, the third season asks a more interesting question: what is he going to do with that power now he has it? We know that Ragnar wants to be more than a brute and a warmonger, he wants to be a statesman, a builder and a farmer, the man who brings his people out of their rocky homeland to a warmer place where the soil is better. But he is also not a fool, and knows his people still like to raid and to fight.

The result of this is a clever two-pronged strategy. Invoking the alliance forged with Ecbert last year, he plans to set up a Viking colony in Wessex. He also plans to appease his more combat-hungry troops by mounting an assault on Paris and carrying off its immense wealth. It's a clever plan which, you'll be shocked to hear, doesn't entirely pan out.

This season sees Viking at its most expansive. There's scenes in Kattegat, several other Scandinavian locations, Wessex, Mercia and in Paris. As well as Ragnar and his extended family and allies, there's also the royal families in Wessex and Mercia to deal with, and a whole new cast of characters in Paris to get to know, including the weak-willed King Charles the Simple, the more formidable Count Odo and the strong-willed Princess Gisla. The rising scale is handled well by the show. The producers deftly interleave a whole series of complex storylines (including a subplot where a very strange man shows up in Kattegat and causes chaos) with verve and skill.

The show also continues to comment on larger-scale historical forces, religion and culture through some very personal character stories. There's the ongoing religious turmoil of Athelstan (and Ragnar's fascination with Christianity) and how this interacts with Floki's growing anger that the threat posed by Christianity to the Norse way of life is being ignored. There's Ecbert's ongoing clash between his acceptance of other cultures (there's a terrific and cynically honest exchange between him and Ragnar) but knowing that his priests and lords will not accept many concessions to the heathens.

The result is a rich tapestry of a show, with more going on than just the endless cycle of betrayal and counter-betrayal in the previous season. The last few episodes of the season then take things to the next level by depicting the full-scale Siege of Paris in all its glory. With lengthy, massive battle sequences that easily match anything in Game of Thrones, this season sees Vikings gain a scope and epic reach to match its already-impressive character work.

Season 3 of Vikings (*****) sees an already-impressive show become even better: grander, more epic, more brutal but also more human, more intimate and smarter. It is available now on Blu Ray (UK, USA) and DVD (UK, USA).

Once upon a time there was a writer named Lev Grossman, who worked for TIME Magazine and had literary ambitions. In 2005 he gained some attention when he called George R.R. Martin "The American Tolkien" in his review of A Feast for Crows. A few years later, having covered more SFF books, he decided to write his own. Faced with the daunting task of creating an original setting, cast of characters, themes to develop and trying to do something new, he gave up and instead mashed together The Chronicles of Narnia and Harry Potter. For added literary street cred he threw in some rich, good-looking New York kids whose lives were painful and agonising because of their wealth and having to attend college lectures a couple of times a day and having to tiresomely have sex with other rich, good-looking people. The result was a success! The novel, The Magicians, sold a lot of copies and he was able to stretch his thin narrative out across two sequels.

Now, and slightly inexplicably (given the number of actually-good SF and fantasy novels still stuck in development hell), it's been turned into a TV show. I imagine Grossman had in mind that the show would be adapted by a massive cable company like HBO and filled with top-tier actors, with high-level production values and the best scriptwriters in the business on the job. Instead, SyFy have turned it into a quick-turnaround popcorn show whilst their main talent is working on the infinitely superior The Expanse instead.

The Magicians, as in the TV show, is quite spectacularly awful and incompetent on a scale you just don't see on TV very much these days. Some modern shows can be boring, or not appeal to a wide demographic, or have structural or tone issues, but in the Golden Age of Television it's rare to see incompetence on this scale. The Magicians has almost no redeeming features whatsoever and borders on the unwatchable.

For starters, the script is awful. No attempt is made to make these characters even remotely sympathetic or interesting. The worldbuilding is thin to the point of non-existence. How the wider magical world works, what happens to evil wizards, why more people don't know about the existence of the other worlds despite magic being around for thousands of years etc is stuff that simply hasn't been thought through (unlike, say Harry Potter). The pacing is dreadful and the structure, which follows two separate storylines that are meant to hook up later, is constantly undercut by the characters from each story constantly bumping into the others, making the world feel claustrophobic and small.

Characterisation is something that happens in other series, not this one. I have no idea what motivates these people. Quentin, our main character, is whiny, weak-willed, selfish to the point of lunacy and tone-deaf to anything going on around him. I get he's suppose to be a difficult college kid, but usually these kind of characters have a redeeming feature, such as being smart or charismatic or funny, or they have unexpected skills. That never happens with Quentin. He's just a self-centred incompetent who spends most of the show whining about things.

Most of the other characters are likewise despicable, or treated with contempt, such as Alice. In the books she's a terribly-written, shy-but-ridiculously-hot cliche (even down to wearing glasses to show she's intellectual, but when she takes them off she suddenly turns into a sex bomb), which remains the case in the TV show. Crassly, the character in the novels is often referred to by her bra size and, jaw-droppingly, this continues in the TV show as well, along with many of the female castmembers appearing in states of partial undress throughout the show (Arjun Gupta, the show's sole good-looking male character, gets the same treatment as well in a vague nod towards equality). For a show made in 2017 it's oddly regressive in this area.

The acting veers from terrible to baffled: many of the cast seem really stymied on character motivation and what exactly they're suppose to be doing. This extends to the more experienced and otherwise dependable hands, like Battlestar Galactica's Rick Worthy as the show's Dumbledore analogue, who also seems to not have a clue what he's supposed to be playing. The sole exception to all of this is Esme Bianco as Eliza. Previously known for playing Ros in Game of Thrones, a very small role that usually required her to appear naked and not much more, Bianco is a bit of a revelation as Eliza, putting in a very charming and charismatic performance. If one actor emerges from this wreck of a show with improved career prospects, it should definitely be her.

The show's production values are also terrible, with some very poor CGI for the magical effects. Things are not improved when the show moves to Fillory. A magical and otherworldly realm, instead it across like the deliberately terrible fantasy world that Angel spent four episodes in, only worse.

It is instructive that shows like this and The Shannara Chronicles (although that may be harsh; for all its problems, The Shannara Chronicles is more entertaining) exist. We live in the so-called "Golden Age of Television" with so many rich and compelling TV shows around that it's not physically possible to watch them all. It's easy to forget the sheer amount of work that goes into making these shows so good, and they don't just roll out of a production line of awesome somewhere. The Magicians shows that if you don't stay on top of this work, it is easy to produce something that is so sub-par it wouldn't have passed muster thirty years ago, let alone now.

The first season of The Magicians (*) is an absolute train-wreck. The casting is weak, characterisation feeble, the script and dialogue are execrable and the production values shockingly poor. Avoid.

Sunday, 12 February 2017

In 2002 Chris Columbus achieved one of the more notable achievements of modern Hollywood film-making. He started filming the second Harry Potter movie, The Chamber of Secrets, a fortnight after the first movie came out. He shot the entire movie, edited it and completed visual effects in time for it to come out a year later. By modern standards, where usually an entire year is given over to post-production and visual effects alone, that's an incredible achievement.

It was also clearly one that cost the film-makers dear, and it's unsurprising that the studio switched to an eighteen-month turn-around time for the later movies in the series. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets is by no means a disaster, but it is the weakest film of the series.The biggest problem with the film is the length. At 2 hours and 40 minutes it's the longest film in the series but it has the slightest plot. The book suffers from its relative slightness as well - being more important in establishing backstory than in telling its own story - but on screen the problem is more pronounced. The film runs out of steam a good half-hour before the undercooked epic finale is reached.There are also some structural and plausibility issues, such people really thinking Harry might be a murderer and Dumbledore being removed from the school for no really convincing reason to try to inject fake drama into the series.Moving away from that, there are many positives in the movie, but by far the most important is that Emma Watson, Daniel Radcliffe and Rupert Grint have all improved immensely as actors since the first film. They are more confident, more naturalistic and more relaxed. There's also been a major uptick in the quality of the effects. The Quidditch match is far better-realised than the first movie. Creatures also sit in the environment more convincingly. The film actually benefits now from being viewed as its own beast, whilst on release it was a bit more obvious that the film's effects were disappointing compared to The Lord of the Rings (most notably that Dobby, although effective, was simply nowhere near as good as Gollum as a CG creation interacting with human actors). The dialogue is also less grating, since the writers can get on with the story rather than having to unload huge amounts of exposition.There's also some superb new additions to the cast, such as Kenneth Branagh as Gilderoy Lockhart, Jason Isaacs as Lucius Malfoy and Shirley Henderson as Moaning Myrtle, who expand the cast with charisma and skill.The result is a bit of an odd film. In many ways a more relaxed and technically accomplished movie than its forebear, with more confident performances, but also one that is far too long for the story it is telling.Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (***) is a watchable movie, but it's neither as charming as its predecessor nor as well-paced and constructed as the later films in the series. It's fun but ultimately too long, and too reliant on unconvincing plot turns. The movie is available now in the UK (DVD,Blu-Ray) and USA (DVD,Blu-Ray) as part of theComplete Harry Potter Movie Collection.

A leaked set photo from Star Trek: Discovery suggests that the show will feature yet another radical redesign of the Klingons, everyone's favourite psychotic-but-honourable warrior race.

The Klingons first appeared in the original Star Trek in 1967, in the first season episode Errand of Mercy, and were portrayed as humans with dark make-up. They appeared in six further episodes of Star Trek in a similar vein.

The Klingons as they appeared in the original Star Trek episode Day of the Dove (1968).

Realising this was a little cheap, they were redesigned for their brief appearance at the start of Star Trek: The Motion Picture in 1979 and gained their familiar forehead ridges and long hair. This look was confirmed in Star Trek III: The Search for Spock in 1984 and remained a constant design all the way to the end of Star Trek: Enterprise in 2005. However, both Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987-94) and Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country (1991) refined the look of the race further with numerous different forehead designs and hairstyles.

The Klingons as they appeared in Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979). With minor refinements, this look would remain constant until the end of Star Trek: Enterprise in 2005.

For Star Trek: Into Darkness in 2013, J.J. Abrams gave the race another makeover, giving them a more symmetrical skull shape but overall still a refinement of the established look.

The Klingons in Star Trek: Into Darkness (2013).

The "new" Klingons appear to be hairless, with extensive ridges along the skull that go right round the head and sides, along with elongated and near-conical heads. They really don't look much like Klingons at all. This has led to speculation that these are either new aliens or a servitor race or sub-race of Klingons (something theorised in spin-off fiction but not the main series).

If they are Klingons, it is a baffling choice to redesign them. Much has been made of the fact that Star Trek: Discovery is set in the original or "Prime" timeline, ten years or so before the events of The Original Series. Using either of the first two designs would make sense (CBS do not have the rights to any designs from the Abramsverse movies, so would not be able to use the Into Darkness appearance), but redesigning them so they don't look like Klingons any more is both unnecessary and does little but alienate a fanbase already sceptical of the new show's poor design sensibilities and status as yet another redundant prequel.